Are you a HOT CELEB? Think your SEXY PICS are safe? Maybe NOT Rather than a single iCloud hack, this week's furore over celebrity nude pics looks more like the work of one or many "secret circles" of hackers whose members mingle on anarchic messageboard 4Chan to share their digital loot from computers and phones they've cracked over a period of years. The photos were, according to one …
This seems to be common thread these days - the lack of any loyalty or morals and the ease with which any thoughts of right or wrong can be discarded or erased. It's much easier to sell your "friends" when the bulk of your interactions are via Facebook than when you meet them in the pub, face to face.
I'm starting to think that social interaction via the Internet is subtly corrosive in ways that are not easy to define.
"This version of events explains why some of the nude celeb images were dated as far back as 2011 and others were taken just last month."
The dates of the pictures has been mentioned a few times, and used as evidence to suggest the cache was grabbed over time. As it happens, it's probably true true - but the dates the photos were taken does not have a bearing on that. Photos tend not to expire over time unlike, say, milk. A photo taken ten years ago can still exist today, in the possession of the person in (or who took) it, and possibly even be stored in the cloud. Possibly even in Apple's iCloud, even if the photo was taken on some other device from the time.
I don't get it either. Sometimes such leaks are on purpose just for the publicity. For the rest, if they don't want their nude photos plastered across the Internet then the simple solution is to not take any nude photos in the first place.
If it's on the Internet and you're a celebrity or other target of interest then just assume that someday someone will try to access your data.
If you're a successful actor in a relationship with a successful actor then you're going to spend quite a lot of time in different parts of the world. Sending dirty selfies in those circumstances isn't crazy. Incautious and ill-advised yes but not totally beyond understanding to a neautral onlooker.
Particularly if you're 22 or thereabouts. Can't speak for anyone else but I was a frikkin' idiot when I was 22, particularly where dangly bits were concerned.
I know Google and Windows Phone/Outlook offer 2-step authentication, as well as Yahoo (a family member got hacked on her yahoo and I sent her instructions on how to 2-step her account, no idea if she bothered in the end though). Does Apple offer 2-step for icloud? can't help but think this may have prevented unwanted brute-force break-ins, anyone care to correct me if I'm wrong?
If I am correct then these companies need to educate their users more (to be fair to microsoft, I know they nag you to set up 2-step whenever you change password using 'forgotten password' link). I highly doubt that many of these celebs (or many non-celebs either) know what 2-step authentication is and this needs to change.
"Could many of these hacks have been prevented with 2-step authentication?"
Could many of those not had been hacked if the owners picked a password that was actually WORTHY of being called a password, AND not stored on a cloud accout where you can brute force it without the owner realising?
Nope, that's too hard, it's easier if you start a scare campaign on tracking down the "criminal" who hacked it in the first place.
So yeah backing up your phone to a stranger's computer, that's totally safe.
This is partly the IT industry's fault, for giving the impression that cloud/remote server/stranger's computer is a safe thing, to be trusted without a second thought, that all strangers' intentions are always good, etc etc etc.
El Reg pokes fun at the cloud fluffers, and they are indeed funny to us. But for the non-technical layman/celebrity, the illusion of safety they peddle is dangerous.
.. why coverage has almost exclusively focused on Apple devices?
The photos were, according to one rumour investigated by The Register, stolen from various cloud backup accounts linked to Apple iPhones, Google Android devices and Windows phones.
Was Google creatively adjusting search results?
Maybe the photos in question were taken using iPhones?
Usually pretty obvious in mirror-selfies, and the meta-data always includes it anyway.
By most accounts that's the case - though I doubt the meta data is still attached to the photos, as otherwise the media would be talking about how the pics also exposed where these people live, as well as parts of their bodies that they didn't want public.
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